THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS

Fred Pfeil has sent in this one of Chesterton's; as it is not yet Christmas for me, I regard it as seasonal. Actually, it should still be Christmas for y'all too; you ought to be up to the drummers drumming by now.

I have a great regard for Chesterton's poetry. It is technically imperfect, but full of something that for lack of a better term I will call humanness; in his day, he was well enough regarded by several very proficient poets that they thought many of his poems would be immortal, but that was before the revolution, when all arts and sciences were captured by nihilists, and Poetry became for the first time an inhuman thing.
------------------

The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

-G.K. Chesterton

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

BEING

The most fundamental thing is what is; "To be, or not to be" is not the question. We are, and even an act of self-termination does not resolve the problem of Being; the real question is, what is our reaction to the reality of our existence? What answer can even God make to one who chooses to deny the goodness of being? Every possible act of beneficence, every beauty and pleasure provided to demonstrate goodness would be regarded by such a one as simply bait in a trap designed to reconcile him to the futility of existence. It is this absolute exercise of will which defines the person; to affirm or deny. The denial of Being is the deepest dimension of evil, an insatiate rage against the Creator as the Fountain of Being. "Evil, be thou my Good" is simply its most characteristic expression. All the Author of Life Himself can do is to say, "I set before you Life and Death, a Blessing and a Curse; therefore, choose Life". There is nothing much that can be done for those who don't.

GOD

Since the rest of my family are either Non-Orthodox or New-Calendar, I get to celebrate Christmas twice; since most of our family were in our house for several days, I haven't been blogging. I suppose this isn't the ideal time to launch a blog; it didn't happen intentionally, I was just messing around one evening and said "Let's see what it would take to get this thing set up", and there I was.

-------------------------------------

This is a subject I introduce more or less in order to dismiss it, because I don't really think it's a very interesting question; I'm just bringing it up to forestall those who would otherwise say I didn't start with the very deepest things. But to me, the existence of God is not the beginning of cognitive reflection, but the elemental presumption which renders reflection possible; Reason in the Void is not truly reason. Neither do I think it possible to prove the existence of God; none of the philosophic proofs of God's existence meant anything to me when I didn't believe in God, and none of them really mean much to me now. Evidences of God's existence are plentiful, proofs there are none. The eyes of the soul discern the certainty of these things, if we do not put blinders on as we are required to do by Science. What can be said to those who are blind to these things except "Take off the blinders"? It is a question of fecundity; you can mate a horse to a jackass, but the offspring is sterile, the line ends there. Reasoning without God is mating with a jackass; you come swiftly to the place where there are no more possibilities.

"But" you might say, "Are you not that one who professes a special interest in roots, and is not the existence of God the most fundamental root of all"? Yes, possibly; but roots which lie so deep are perilous for poor, weak creatures to probe into. You wander into dark caverns, and dwell in lightless misery, until you come to hate the light of Sun and Moon (gollum, gollum). Wishing only to probe the conditions of our life, oriented to the worship and service of God is the productive form of root-grubbing; you learn why things in the forest do not prosper, and occasionally find tubers, "rare good ballast for an empty stomach".

To expand somewhat on Chesterton's analogy, God is the blazing sun at the center of the universe; we cannot look at it. In fact, so intense is that light that it defeats our vision, and the light of God becomes clouds and darkness for us. All the lesser lines of inquiry disappear into that darkness, all plainly oriented in the same direction, but we cannot with plain sight describe that juncture, we know only by faith that all things are reconciled in God.

POETRY

O. K., after Ochlophobe's endorsement I'm almost afraid to write; keep your expectations low, and you won't be disappointed.

By way of lightening the tone a bit, I'm going to be publishing a small amount of poetry here. You retain all rights, simultaneous submissions O. K.. I don't care if it's been published before or not, if it's anything you would like me and my readers to see, send it in. Also, if you have a favorite poem you would like to share with everyone, send it; just be sure you include the name of the author, and make sure I am aware that it is not yourself. I'll probably only be doing 3-4 poems a month, and maybe a couple of my own. Send submissions to: ddcomfort@gmail.com. If you send them to the comments page, I will delete them. Decisions of the editor are final.

To start things out, here's one of my own:

-----------------

Pertinacity

Living branch is grafted to dead tree;

dead tree wilts, the branch salutes the Spring,

the springing lily's bugle calls: Rejoice!

The weeping willow bows to it's decay.

Fruits and flowers fill the leafy branch

as branching beauties sprout on either side;

breeze blows, the tree begins to sway,

the live branch scatters petals to the wind.

Dead tree is lonely in infirmity,

bark sloughs off, the worm bores through the bole.

Blue moon looks down to where the tree still stands,

decrepit, leprous, by an evil fen;

in the drear light, an object lies upon

dark grass, dank with fever and disease,

flowers withered, fruits yet unmatured,

dead branch lies broken, rotted at the base.

-Don Comfort

GOLLUM

I have decided, despite all previously cited reasons, to start publishing my own blog; this will probably be a fairly temporary thing, and if it doesn't work out for me, I'll quit. My reason for starting is that I have thought of a line of questioning which intrigues me, and would like to see what kinds of comments it would elicit. I chose the title "Earl Donald the Bewildered, of Grasshopper-in-the-hole", because I wanted something fairly self-depreciatory to show we are all equals in this arena; "James the Thickheaded" I thought good, and that blog with the title "Absolute Nonsense" or something like that, but I wanted something a little different. Then I came across a site where you could get faux English titles produced by typing in your first name, and have it combined with a title description in overblown heraldic-sounding language. I thought it was hilarious, and produced one for all the members of my immediate family, and then promptly lost the address of the site. My birth-name is Donald (Maxim is my Saint's name, which I go by except in Family situations), so I decided just to use my fake title as the title of the blog.

On this site, I would like to primarily explore some very basic questions of philosophy, mainly by way of retracing the steps that brought me out of secular materialist darkness; these are very simple questions, but my wrong understanding of them made it impossible to break my chains and set out on the road to freedom.

As I have contemplated my life, I have thought it's a little like being born in the upper branches of a mighty tree in a great forest, and one day setting out to discover the unshakable certitudes in which these trees are rooted. As you work your way down the trunk, everything becomes so much more massive and impressive, until finally you arrive at the very base of the tree, and find that the whole forest is literally rooted in nothing; maybe a thin tendril of root or two still connecting it to terra firma, but otherwise unsupported, living off of the nourishment it stored away in the days when it was still connected to the life-giving earth.

This discovery motivated me to set off on a quest for things truly rooted. It is a perilous quest; if you are not careful, like Gollum you may find the deep secrets you expected are only hunger and lightless misery, but it is better than going back to your tree, rootless and rotting from within, for knowledge of roots is what our people are dying for. I constantly run into people who are more intelligent and better informed than I (not difficult), but they seem to have an elemental confusion in all their deepest thoughts, and I have concluded it is usually because they are of the forest, and have no knowledge of roots. So, dear readers, let's do some grubbing around in the roots, shall we?